Happy to report that Marshall Herskowitz joins us as a keynote for the upcoming Digital Media Summit on June 9-10 (combined with Music 2.0) Most recently President of the Producer’s Guild of America, Herskowitz is also an Emmy-winning writer, director and producer, whose range extends from The Last Samurai to thirtysomething. In her keynote, Charlene Li, principal analyst at Forrester Research and author of Groundswell,will expand upon the book’s theme of winning in a world transformed by social technologies– a major theme of the conference… Look for other keynote announcements in the next few days…

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A friend of ours pulled her daughter off of MySpace after she discovered that the girl was publishing provocatively dressed pictures of herself labeled with "slut".

Now we learn of a prominent blogger who was forced to cancel an appearance at eTech in San Diego after receiving death threats. Programmer Kathy Sierra was guilty of no more provocative posts on her popular Creating Passionate Users blog than titles such as "Code Like a Girl" and  the "Hi-Res User Experience" might suggest.

Yet she was forced to stay "at home, with the windows locked, terrified” rather than attend the conference after she received death threats on her site — and even more alarmingly — on the sites of two other respected bloggers.

This is sobering for me. Two weeks ago, I spent two days at the Digital Media Summit promoting the role of media companies in the emerging social media and user-generated content revolutions.

The problem is, some of those users are going to be psychos. And others, like my friend’s daughter, are victims waiting to happen.

I’m not sure how closely the media giants at the vanguard of social media — companies like Fox (MySpace), Sony (Grouper) and Google (YouTube) — have thought through the implications of unleashing the public’s Dark Side. But I hope they spend more time thinking about it before people end up dead.

See Also

• Abuse, threats quiet bloggers’ keyboards

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